AMID CONFUSION, SLAVIN APPOINTED HEAD OF FOREIGN POLICY COUNCIL.

Only hours before Primakov’s appointment as Foreign Minister was announced, Russian press reports indicated that the Foreign Ministry was working under the direction of first deputy minister Igor Ivanov. The latter had rushed back to Moscow from a vacation following Kozyrev’s resignation. Yet it had been reported January 5 that Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Krylov would take control of the ministry. Almost lost in the shuffle of events was Yeltsin’s appointment of Vladimir Slavin as head of the recently created Foreign Policy Council. Slavin, a professional diplomat born in 1948, has been working on the staff of presidential foreign policy advisor Dmitri Rurikov. (11) The future role of the Foreign Policy Council in Russian foreign policy has been unclear; given that Primakov brings considerably more influence to his post than does Slavin, its role is unlikely to be dominant.

Contract Soldiers Majority Of Russian Force In Bosnia.